Thursday Thoughts

I'm going to be out of town the rest of today, back tomorrow afternoon. The main news is the heightened repression, abundantly documented all over the net. I won't take up bandwith to repeat it here.

Some are asking whether the insurrection/revolution is losing steam. It is a legitimate question, especially in a world of famously short attention spans. It does not apply to the fighters in Iran, for whom life is no longer doled out in six-minute bytes. For them, the big issue is winning, and the immediate issue is getting through the day. And then the night. They are looking for various ways of fighting, since direct confrontation, at least at the moment, has limited appeal. Thus we see the hit-and-run attacks about which Eli Lake wrote this morning in the Washington Times, and which the Guardian links to.

There are many things we do not see, and which we would not see even if the regime weren't trying to isolate Iran from the world. We still don't know whether, as widely rumored, Rafsanjani has obtained the signatures of many senior clerics, calling for either the replacement of Khamenei or the abolition of the position of supreme leader (which would be the end of the Islamic Republic). If he has such a document, what will he do with it? Hard to know or even to guess.

Mousavi: instead of shrinking into the background he is becoming more aggressive and more outspoken. And he is winning some important allies, such as Tehran mayor Qalibaf, who has come out for peaceful demonstrations.

Meanwhile, there's a lot we should be doing to help the Iranian people. The two big items are a)build a strike fund, and b) set up a communications system that enables Iranians to report news to an offshore location (whether on a ship, an island, in London or in Los Angeles doesn't matter) and then relays that information to all Iranians. They need to know what's going on. People in Isfahan need the news from Tabriz, Shiraz, and Tehran, etc.

Those are the main things. There are others. But that's for next time.